Charity Water

We have a lot of pretty awesome people at Magnet Forensics, and every day I’m reminded just how awesome. A colleague of mine, Danielle Braun, had what I thought was an incredible idea for her birthday. For Danielle’s birthday, she’s not asking for more new clothes, for her parents to get her a car, for help with paying off tuition, or for some new fancy tech gadgets. But she’s not asking for nothing. Danielle is asking for your support with Charity: Water this year.

Charity: Water is a non-profit organization with the goal of bringing clean water to people in developing nations that don’t have access to it. Reading their mission page probably opens your eyes a fair bit about the lack of access to drinking water in other countries. They’re not about some complex and elaborate plan to revolutionize access to clean drinking water. However, they do have a simple and straight forward approach. Donate a little bit of money and they can install wells, rain catchments, and filters in areas without access to clean water. Your small contribution can make a huge impact on other peoples’ lives.

Holiday Gifts EVERY Employee Secretly Wants: Dharmesh Shah is a guy who always seems to have an awesome perspective to share. There are a few things that despite someone’s level of performance, length of employment, or amount of skill should be deserved. Often these are overlooked either by grumpy managers or because perhaps the person may not have been a top performer. In Dharmesh’s opinion, that shouldn’t be a factor. The holidays are a perfect time to remind ourselves to recognize all of our employees’ accomplishments and treat them with respect. If you aren’t already, maybe this article is the little wake-up call you need.

6 Things Really Thoughtful Leaders Do: Nothing groundbreaking here, but like the article says, this time of year is great for reflecting. Do you consider yourself a thoughtful leader? Do you observe the people around you, how they interact, and how things are flowing at work? Do you take the time to reflect on things you’ve done, how you’ve acted, or even how employees may have improved in areas you’ve discussed with them? There’s a handful of great reminders in this article that I would suggest you check out!

14 Code Refactoring smells you can easily sense and What you can do about it?: This week’s first programming article! Except… Well… This one is about the management side of programming. How do you know if your software team’s code is in a real stinky spot? This doesn’t necessarily mean your developers write bad code. It could just mean that you need to hit the brakes a bit and go revisit some problem areas in the code. This article talks about some of the warning signs.

What Makes A Good Manager? 7 Things To Ask Before You Promote: Does it make sense to give anyone you’re promoting a management position? Probably not. Seems obvious when you ask it like that, right? The unfortunate truth is that a lot of companies take the simple path and for anyone they want to promote, they throw a management position their way. Some people just don’t make great managers. This article talks about the qualities you want to look for in managers. Maybe the person you’re looking to promote won’t make a good manager *now*, but if it’s something they can put time and effort into building the skills and experience towards, it could still happen.

10 Major Causes for Failure in Leadership: While lists of things to do are always nice, having a list of things to definitely not do is also helpful. Here’s one of them. Some of the leadership-don’ts I liked on this list were being too good to serve your followers, using your “authority”, and fear of competition. I think those are a few that are easy for people to forget, and there at the top of my list of leadership-don’ts. Read some more great points in the article!

Please take some time to help Danielle out with her goal. Any contribution helps. Remember to follow Dev Leader on social media outlets to get these updates through the week. Thanks!

Movember Wrap-up

At the start of December, it’s time for a lot of us to shave off our glorious Movember badges from our upper lips. This year, MoMagnets did an absolutely amazing job raising money for Movember. At the time of writing, we’re sitting at just under $2400! An incredible effort by Magnet Forensics and all of those that helped with their generous contributions.

My ‘stache didn’t quite get to where I wanted to this year. It was close, but it was another connector-less Movember for me. I was almost able to get some twisting done for some not-so-legitimate connectors. Oh well… Here’s what I ended up rocking for most of the month:

My final Movember creation: The Anti-Connector.

Matt Chang definitely took the lead for raising the most of all the MoMagnets members at over $700! Mica Sadler is sitting in second at just under $400. That’s nearly half the team’s total between these two beauties. We also had a very gracious contribution from our CEO that I wanted to call out. Thanks so much, Adam!

There’s still a bit of time left before donations are closed for the 2013 Movember season. We have until the 9th to get some final contributions in! If you’re feeling generous, please visit our team page and make a contribution. Every little bit helps, and we greatly appreciate it!

Articles

Top 5 Reasons People Love Their Jobs and How You Can Love Yours, Too: Some great points on why people love their jobs. Some of these may be pretty obvious, but it’s important to be reminded about what keeps people engaged. Among the top things: the work culture, the amazing people you get to work with, and autonomy. If you’re trying to create an awesome place to work (or if you’re looking for an awesome place to work) then these are probably things you’ll want to focus on!

5 Things Zapping Your Company’s Productivity: Ilya Pozin always has some interesting articles. This article takes the perspective that some of the fancy perks or awesome processes you have in place may actually be hindering productivity. One common theme that was brought up under two separate points in this article is that sometimes people need a spot where they can work in peace. People like having an fun collaborative culture, but many personality types require some quiet time in order to buckle down.

Reduce Your Stress in 2 Minutes a Day: I’m not the type of person that truly believes doing one tiny thing for only a moment every day is going to have an enormous positive impact on your life. However, I do think that if you can take the time to try and do a few little things here and there, that overtime, you’re likely to have more a positive outlook. In this article, Greg McKeown shares a few tips on relaxing and trying to regain some focus. I don’t think it’s anything that’s going to be life-changing, but it never hurts to think about different ways to catch your breath.

Code Smells – Issue Number 3: This is an article I wrote about Code Smells. This entry talks about the use of exception handlers to guide logical flow in your code and alternatives for when your class hierarchy starts to get too many very light weight classes. As always, I’d love to get your feedback. If you have other code smells, or a different perspective on the ones that I’ve posted, please share them in the comments!

5 Bad Thoughts That Will Throw You Off Track: This short little list is worth a quick read through. There are a ton of things that distract us every day, but the distractions you can easily control are the ones that you cause. Examples? Don’t take on too much at once. Don’t try to make every little thing you do perfect. It’s a quick read, but well worth the reminder!

Not Crying Over Old Code: Another programming article for this week. As the article says, the common meme for programming is that your old code is always bad code. However, there should be a point in your programming career where old code isn’t bad, it’s just different than how you might have approached it now. If your always experiencing your old code being bad, then maybe you’re not actually that great at programming yet! Or… maybe you’re just too damn picky.

Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code: This article by Cecily Carver is something I’ve been hoping to come across for a while now. It’s another programming article–a good read for experienced programmers but incredibly important for newbies to check out. Cecily covers some of the roadblocks you experience early on, like code never (almost never) working the first time, or things you experience throughout your programming career, like always being told of a “better” alternative. I highly recommend you read through this if you dabble in programming, or if you’ve ever considered it.

Please visit our team page for MoMagnets and make a Movember contribution if you’re able to! Remember to follow Dev Leader on social media outlets to get these updates through the week. Thanks!

Code Smells

Welcome to the third edition of Code Smells! Periodically I’ll be posting about how to detect code smells and what they mean in terms of the big picture of your code. The previous installment can be found right here.

In computer programming, code smell is any symptom in the source code of a program that possibly indicates a deeper problem. Code smells are usually not bugs—they are not technically incorrect and don’t currently prevent the program from functioning. Instead, they indicate weaknesses in design that may be slowing down development or increasing the risk of bugs or failures in the future.

These code smells are often based on my own opinion and experience with programming. If you disagree with what I’m saying in my post, please don’t hesitate to post a comment. I’d love to clarify anything I may have worded poorly and discuss your perspective–especially if you have a completely different take on things!

The Stink List

Code Smell #7: Using exceptions to control logical flow. This is a pretty nasty path to get into and a bad code smell to stumble upon. Luckily, it’s generally relatively easy to improve. Using exception handling to control logical flow is, in general, misleading. It’s relying on a mechanism used to catch unexpected errors in order to direct the flow of your program. Often times we can use things like if statements to check for these conditions before throwing exceptions.

A common scenario where I see this is parsing. I’ll illustrate this code smell with a little C# example:

It seems a bit contrived, but I’ve seen lots of code written like this–and you know what? This works. It gets the job done. However, there are other mechanisms built-in to .NET that let us do parsing a little bit nicer:

The second set of code doesn’t need to catch exceptions to know that the parsing wasn’t successful. It may not be obvious from this example but throwing and catching exceptions can be quite expensive compared to a few logical sanity checks instead (and before getting into a debate on this, just know the impact it has on your program. I’ve had things go from taking several seconds to multiple minutes, but there are certainly cases where performance will be negligible).

The additional kicker in my contrived example is using the base Exception class to create what a colleague of mine refers to as Pokemon Exception Handlers. Thus, even if you didn’t want to restructure your code, using a specific exception type would:

Indicate to other programmers what you’re trying to accomplish

Not swallow other potential problems and have them go unseen

Now, this code smell isn’t always possible to avoid entirely. If you’re interfacing with third party components, sometimes you do have to rely on catching exceptions that you can’t otherwise check for ahead of time. If you don’t have the code, you can’t know for every path how/when/why exceptions will be thrown. The same thing could be said when running within an environment where state cannot be guaranteed. Sometimes it’s just necessary. In this case, I would suggest that instead of using Pokemon Exception Handlers, you try to catch the specific exceptions you know you need to watch out for.

Takeaway:

If a simple logic check can be used instead of throwing/catching exceptions, it’s likely a better bet.

Try to avoid exception handlers that catch all exceptions. Something nasty might sneak by as a result of it.

Interfacing with some code or working working in certain environments means you have to rely on exception logic. Take a deep breath and move on.

Code Smell #8: Having an object hierarchy that requires many very light weight classes. Object oriented programming and how object hierarchies are structured are pretty complicated topics of discussion, so I’m not about to try and over simplify it with discussion of this code smell. This is mostly something I’ve gathered from my own programming experience, so I’ll try to illustrate with examples that parallel things I would have come across.

When I’m building an object hierarchy, sometimes it’s not really apparent just how big and complicated it might get. I might start off with a base class and two child classes of it. Over time, the top three levels in my hierarchy have all turned into some sort of class abstraction, and I don’t hit concrete implementations until a few levels down hte hierarchy. Not a big deal–Sometimes it’s just hard to tell where things will go. When things get to the point where in order to introduce a new class and functionality all I need to do is inherit a class and override a single property or method, that’s a bit of a red flag for me.

On the surface, this seems pretty cool. The hierarchy is apparently solidified enough that extending it is really simple if all I need is a single property or method replacement. So why is this a code smell?

In my opinion, it has to do with the duplication of code. If I end up having many child classes (where child in this case represents the child-most class of my mature object hierarchy) that differ only by a single property or method, then I should look at how these classes are being constructed. I wrote recently about how I used lambda expressions to refactor similar code with classes that differed by a single method. My solution, in this case, was to examine the factory that created my classes. Instead of having 10’s of different child classes with a bunch of boilerplate code, I had one factory that could specify the code that differentiated each class.

The benefit of this?

Keep class hierarchies from ballooning our of control. Changing an API down the road can mean making changes in many spots.

Reduce duplication of boilerplate code. This might be the code required to define a simple constructor or override a getter property.

This is only one small example, but if you get into this situation in your class hierarchy, I’d recommend investigating to see if you can refactor in a similar approach. Maybe your class hierarchy is incredibly mature and isn’t changing much. If that’s the case, you may not even want to touch it. So be it. If you’re still actively adding classes to your hierarchy, it may be better to try analyzing it sooner rather than later.

Takeaway:

Object oriented design is a complex topic of discussion.

There’s no one perfect way to make your class hierarchies.

Having many child classes that differ by a property/method or two may be worth checking for refactoring opportunities.

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this issue of Code Smells. As always, it’d be great to open the floor to discussion. I don’t believe in absolutes, so identifying code smells is not meant to be me preaching some made up laws of programming. Let me know your thoughts on these code smells or share code smells of your own!

I work as a team lead of software engineering at Magnet Forensics (http://www.magnetforensics.com). I'm into powerlifting, bodybuilding, and blogging about leadership/development topics over at http://www.devleader.ca.